Comment Re:much more so for proprietary projects (Score 1) 162
It's also the reason why the Java enterprise platform is getting ever more bloated and unwieldy, while most real people write stuff in PHP.
The "Java enterprise" platform is ambiguous today, unless you're talking strictly of Sun J2EE components. If you find the J2EE components to be bloated and unwieldy, there are now plenty of lightweight alternatives. Fact is, Java has the best quality Open Source tools available today for developing business applications. If you think Ruby on Rails, Python, and PHP can do the same, you've never developed the type of software I'm talking about. The HTML web is not everything. A very large share of real-world business software does not align to single-threading and being tied synchronous to HTTP requests. Furthermore, rich-clients are absolutely essential in many cases. Of the three Java-alternative languages, Python is the only one with most of the core language features needed to compete in this arena. However, Python's development tools are still in their infancy, it is not as performant as Java, it's multi-platform client capabilities are limited, and the language specification itself is sloppy. (hence projects like PyPy which hope to remedy this)
The future of application software does not belong to lightweight scripted HTML-web software; it belongs to lightweight Semantic-web software that makes heavy use of XML web services, intelligent agents, and dynamic (repository-style) data stores, and smart/rich clients. Right now there are two platforms that can serve this need: Java and .NET. The longer that Open Source developers waste time on their "re-invent the wheel geek toys," the further behind Java will fall for lack of due mindshare. Java is the premiere Open Source language today and it is the rallying point behind the most successful commercial Open Source efforts. As any language, Java still has flaws but they are being fixed rapidly. Open Source developers need to collectively realize this and get with the program. The alternative is a world where .NET is the only relevant platform for anything beyond forums, blogs and CMS tools.
The "Java enterprise" platform is ambiguous today, unless you're talking strictly of Sun J2EE components. If you find the J2EE components to be bloated and unwieldy, there are now plenty of lightweight alternatives. Fact is, Java has the best quality Open Source tools available today for developing business applications. If you think Ruby on Rails, Python, and PHP can do the same, you've never developed the type of software I'm talking about. The HTML web is not everything. A very large share of real-world business software does not align to single-threading and being tied synchronous to HTTP requests. Furthermore, rich-clients are absolutely essential in many cases. Of the three Java-alternative languages, Python is the only one with most of the core language features needed to compete in this arena. However, Python's development tools are still in their infancy, it is not as performant as Java, it's multi-platform client capabilities are limited, and the language specification itself is sloppy. (hence projects like PyPy which hope to remedy this)
The future of application software does not belong to lightweight scripted HTML-web software; it belongs to lightweight Semantic-web software that makes heavy use of XML web services, intelligent agents, and dynamic (repository-style) data stores, and smart/rich clients. Right now there are two platforms that can serve this need: Java and
